Windows 11 and Windows 10 were recently updated with “Windows Backup”, which has now become a system app. While the feature initially appeared as “optional” or something that could be easily dismissed, Microsoft is slowly getting aggressive with its new OneDrive backup campaign on Windows 11.
Windows 11’s “Windows Backup” uses OneDrive to back up many of the things that are important to you. This may include your credentials, settings, pictures, documents, videos, files, themes, or even audio settings. Microsoft wants the Windows Backup app to become the ultimate backup tool, but there’s a catch.
Windows Backup does not support offline backups and requires a OneDrive plan. By default, OneDrive offers 5GB of free storage, which is why some users do not want to backup their PC. But is that going to stop Microsoft from pestering users? Probably not. In a new server-side update, Windows 11 has started nagging users to try the Backup tool.
I’m getting tired of Microsoft reading my data. What’s you backup strategy on linux?
Not OP but:
Separate the system and home partition, first of all. The strategies are usually different.
Many distros integrate Timeshift out of the box to create system partition snapshots before every update, and to be able to restore them from the boot menu. Using BTRFS for the system partition makes this even better.
This is usually all that people need in regards to the system, but you can also take regular backups (see below) of things like /etc, the list of installed packages and things like that.
For personal files I prefer Borg Backup because it is incremental, does compression, deduplication, encryption, checksums & recovery.
Borg works with repositories, which can be on local disk, on a removable disk, or remote. If remote, they are tunneled over SSH. It can also export/import tarballs for more exotic scenarios like moving snapshots between different repositories or backing up data to optical discs.
You can use Borg from the CLI and there are also UI apps that make it easier. Pika Backup is a simpler one, Vorta is a more advanced one. I’ve set up family members with Pika and after preparing it for them all they have to do is plug in the backup HDD, open Pika, and hit the big “backup now” button.
There are also online services that support Borg repositories specifically, and for anything that doesn’t you can export tarballs and back them up as regular files, completely transparently from the service.
rclone is a cli tool that supports a large number of online storage services. You can use it with borg snapshots or you can use it to back up your files directly — it resembles rsync somewhat and can also do encryption iirc.
Good writeup.
But why separate /home?
I get that it makes it easy to just grab the home partition in full, but grabbing just your own home folder isn’t any more difficult than grabbing a home partition.
And it makes it really fucking annoying to manage storage between / and /home. You have to pick how much disk space you want for your own things and how much you want for installing things, and changing it later is a giant PIA. The one time I did it I kept running out of space on one or the other.
Separate root fs makes it easier for timeshift. Snapshots are a different beast from backups.
Also makes it easy to install another distro and pick up where you left off with the old home.
If you alocate 50-60 GB for system it should be ok. Things like Flatpak or Steam can put their files in home.
I don’t store any data on my home machines. Anything important is on my NAS which then gets backed up to Backblaze, and to a NAS as my parents house.
I can wipe my laptop and have apps set up again in an hour, and my desktop mainly stores games I can just redownload from Steam.
